It has been a while since I did my grand tour of Europe, but back when I did backpack Europe on a budget, I focused on Western Europe. I shared my Western Europe itinerary in a blog post and shared how I did this route by train with a Eurail pass. They aren’t super cheap but are affordable but you do need reservations for train seats. These days, I go back to Europe a lot and revisit places I loved. But now I fly rather than taking trains. It’s so easy to book cheap flights around Europe. If you’re on a time-restraint when traveling Europe, flying is a valid option although trains are usually what backpackers use. In this post, I’m going to share how to use the Kiwi multi-city tool to book cheap flights around Europe for $355 covering all the major backpacking countries and many top cities.
This isn’t sponsored by Kiwi.com. They are the flight booking tool I use for nearly all my flight bookings personally. I do get a commission if you book through a link from my site to Kiwi.com at no extra cost to you. I would get the same commission if I linked to any other booking site but I choose Kiwi because they are the best!
Kiwi.com is a unique booking site because they do flight hacking for you and combine non-code-share flights to get you crazy deals. I wrote a full review here which I highly suggest you read so you can see how to make the most of Kiwi.com.
How to Use Kiwi.com’s Multi-City Tour To Book Cheap Flights Around Europe & Visit 9 Popular European Cities (in 7 countries) for $355 USD.
I did a similar article to this about how to use Kiwi.com’s multi-city tool to fly all around India for less than $200 which people were shocked was real. Indians were commenting “this is impossible!” and I replied with “nope, this is 100% possible and this post shows you how easy it is”.
I realized I should do this for places and start by showing you how to book cheap flights around Europe! Kiwi’s multi-city tool is incredible and is easy to use. You can click here to get started and try this out yourself.
- To get started just go to the site and where you see “return” and “one-way” click “multi-city”.
- Choose a starting point. I chose London since that’s where most American people fly into Europe from.
- Choose the “to” as “anywhere”.
When results start to pop up, you’ll choose the CHEAPEST one as long as you going onward to somewhere you want to go and not going back on yourself. It shows it all on a map, so it’s easy to picture the route that you would take.
So, I put in London to Anywhere and chose the date a month out just for example, and searched. The results came up as shown below and without filters shows the cheapest rate. I would likely choose Paris for $41.23.
If where it says “show popular” on the screenshot below says “show cheapest” instead, make sure to click “show cheapest”!
You click Paris and it’ll give you all the time options for the 1st of August. The cheap flight rate of $41.23 is at 930 PM so I’d click that one.
You would click “add flight” back up in the search bar area and “anywhere” again to keep traveling onward. Here you can select a date or if you’re flexible put a “date range” for even better deals. I set the date range at Aug 4-7. It will populate a calendar that will show the rates each day. I then could fly onward to the next cheapest place, Milan, for $61.85… but I won’t and I’ll tell you why!
When you click the flight you want, it will show the total price including all flights chosen so far. So far, it would be $103.08 if I picked Milan but I’m not going to do that because it’s not just about finding the cheapest flight, it’s going places you WANT to go. Milan is amazing but maybe not on every backpacker’s itinerary… but these days, Ibiza sure is! So, I went with that to make this itinerary even better.
So I just keep doing this until I have covered all the places I want to go. I chose places that were cheap but not always the cheapest option so keep in mind you can fly around Europe even cheaper than this.
Here is the final product I got:
London > Paris > Ibiza > Valencia > Barcelona > Geneva > Venice > Berlin > Amsterdam
This flight path means you’d be in England, France, 3 places in Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Holland. So you’ve covered 9 cities across 7 countries for $355 USD. Try it out yourself!
You can see cities have prices listed and you can keep adding onto this if you want to. Alternatively, you can just book on Kiwi.com as you go but I suggest doing it all ahead of time so you know what to pack and can book hotels.
As mentioned, I didn’t always choose the cheapest place in this example but instead chose places people would actually want to go if they hadn’t been to Europe before. Therefore, it isn’t the cheapest possible. The locations are meant to cover most popular spots keeping a budget in mind and it worked out pretty well.
You can see all the flight options in the boxes when you scroll down, which have all your chosen flights laid out. You can scroll down to more boxes where there are the same flights at different times and choose the one you like best. It will automatically choose the cheapest flight time so on the first box.
Just select the timings you like best, and click “book this flight” and you can book all your flights at once! It will look like this:
It’ll get sent to your phone is you put a phone number and you can get all your e-tickets to your phone.They will send you separate tickets for each flight as if they were all booked apart.
Just for the sake of it, I’m going to do another route on Kiwi.com using Milan, just to see how it would have changed and you can see how it can vary based on one decision. This route came to $424 and covers less common destinations for a first-time visit to Europe.
So, that’s the easy trick to book cheap flights around Europe all at once for your big backpacking trip!
You can use this tool in many ways to make the most of it. If you’re on a budget and flexible you’ll see huge savings and results from this. If you’re really set on specific places, I think you’ll find that those show up in the results. For each place I had to make a choice on, there would be 20 options around Europe with very similar price ranges for flights (just a difference of 3 or 3 dollars.
You can do this not just in Europe but in all regions of the world. Kiwi.com uses budget airlines in their searches so you’ll get rates like this everywhere!
Futher reading: I have articles all over my blog about places to visit in Western Europe and you can search in the search bar on my homepage or go through all my Europe posts. Remember to read up on travel insurance before your trip!
This sounds very interesting.. I am gonna take a look at this, because it sounds like a good idea to see some of Europe!
Thanks so much for sharing!x
Hope it can help you!
This is very cool… but, I would suggest for anyone backpacking around Europe that flying from place to place isn’t the most fun or the most enlightening way to get around. Flying might be fast, but overland travel is far more rewarding (and better for the environment).
J
Rachel, you’re a magician. I linked to this from my masterclass on finding cheap flights.